Designing sustainable office spaces – how to combine workspace characteristics with sufficiency strategies

Abstract

Contemporary workspace and office concepts are part of many major commercial real estate projects and have been continuously developed over many years. With a rising awareness for sustainable development, workspace and office concepts are increasingly being considered in terms of their environmental performance. Sustainable design strategies therefore traditionally differentiate between efficiency, consistency, and sufficiency, whereas the latter approach is the least explored in the construction industry. Sufficiency can be described by a user behaviour characterized by frugality and modesty, as opposed to wasteful consumption. Moreover, the strategy of sufficiency is linked to a high and critical awareness of using natural resources and environmental impacts which also affects the built environment. The aim of this paper is therefore to combine these two subject areas in a structured way and derive potentials for the sufficient development of office concepts.Based on a literature review in the field of workspace design and flexible workplace management, design features of office spaces are conceived and compiled according to planning aspects in office concepts based on employee needs. Another literature review in the field of sufficiency in the building sector provides the corresponding structure for the considered sufficiency strategies. Sufficiency measures follow recurring principles for the reduction of resource consumption. Essential principles of impact are identified and presented in this paper. The investigated topic areas are compiled together in a logical model based on a developed mapping framework. This forms the basis for defining sufficient measures that can be derived to sufficiency strategies in the project development of office buildings. The basis of all measures is to strive for a minimum level of resource consumption that is necessary to satisfy the needs of the users and that is considered valuable by them, following the basic idea of the sufficiency approach. The results are validated using an office building in the planning stage. The paper leads to a common understanding and structuring of design features of future office spaces and their environmental impact. Furthermore, the approach provides guidance for concepts on how design features can be considered regarding sufficiency strategies.